Cyberpunk 2077 [PC, PS4, XBone] - out September 17 2020

[DjchunKfunK]

I feel for the developers, they have been crunching and doing 100 hour weeks since the beginning of the year so to hear they have to do more work after thinking the end was in sight must be crushing.

It's also lead to developers receiving a bunch of abuse and death threats because people are awful.

[Wrathbone]

I think I might wait and have it as a Christmas present. That way it's a present actually worth having and I'll have a couple of weeks to get stuck into it.

There really is no excuse for long-term crunch in the top-dollar game studios these days. The estimated budget for Cyberpunk is around $150m - the same as the first Avengers movie. They can't seriously expect people to believe they couldn't hire some more developers to ease the workload?

Also no excuse for abuse and death threats, of course.

[DjchunKfunK]

I don't know how to feel about the whole crunch thing in terms of whether I should buy a game or not. On one hand I don't want to support a company that works it's employees like this but on the other it is still their hard work that has gone into this and the developers often say themselves that despite the crunch they would like people to see their work.

[Wrathbone]

Honestly, especially with everything going on this year, there are levels of morality I willfully turn a blind eye to because otherwise I'd lose the plot completely. We're all complicit to some degree in practices that are quite horrible when a light is shined on them. Striving to be better is admirable, but moral responsibility is a spectrum, not an absolute.

Crunch is not black and white either - on the one hand the company shouldn't be treating their staff like this, but on the other hand the software job market is quite healthy, and there are development jobs out there which pay well and don't demand regular crunch. I get that working on Cyberpunk is way more interesting than working on, say, database maintenance for a box factory, but if your health and sanity are at stake then I have to wonder why many of the devs stay at these crunch fests.

[Animalmother]

The fact that they won't launch the game until they're happy with it gives me confidence that it'll be great. Crunch times are a really shitty and draconian way of doing things, release dates should be more fluid. The little cunts sending the death threats should be named shamed and prosecuted.

[Mantis]

I'm sure that there are plenty who drive themselves into the ground during constant crunch purely out of passion for the project they are working on. It must be quite the dream to work on something so ambitious and interesting.

But then for every staff member who is super motivated in that way, I'm sure there's an equal number who put the obsence hours in because they feel obliged to due to pressure from managers or fear that not accepting that office culture may hurt their career prospects.

[arqueturus]

I think I might wait and have it as a Christmas present. That way it's a present actually worth having and I'll have a couple of weeks to get stuck into it.

There really is no excuse for long-term crunch in the top-dollar game studios these days. The estimated budget for Cyberpunk is around $150m - the same as the first Avengers movie. They can't seriously expect people to believe they couldn't hire some more developers to ease the workload?

Also no excuse for abuse and death threats, of course.

No excuse for a crunch like that, perhaps in the last few days to try and make a date yes but that's about it and I can say that's not really what crunch is - just a push for the line, like running or rowing a boat in a race.

I would say that you can't just throw more resource at it hit a date, that's diminishing returns after a point, then you're left with reducing scope which we know they've done which finally leave - moving the date back.

Ultimately, a better estimation from the start gets rid of crunch even though it's hard to predict something like Covid-19 which will have negatively impacted this production.

As for the abuse and death threats, I weep for the state of humankind, genuinely.

[arqueturus]

I'm sure that there are plenty who drive themselves into the ground during constant crunch purely out of passion for the project they are working on. It must be quite the dream to work on something so ambitious and interesting.

But then for every staff member who is super motivated in that way, I'm sure there's an equal number who put the obsence hours in because they feel obliged to due to pressure from managers or fear that not accepting that office culture may hurt their career prospects.

Games dev and qa is seen as some kind of celebrity occupation - glamourous and pioneering, cool, like Pilots were in the golden age of air travel. The system abuses this by taking bright eyed newly qualified devs and putting them through a mincer. I know loads of devs that have slung game development and moved to much more mundane stuff for just that reason.

[DjchunKfunK]

Crunch is not black and white either - on the one hand the company shouldn't be treating their staff like this, but on the other hand the software job market is quite healthy, and there are development jobs out there which pay well and don't demand regular crunch. I get that working on Cyberpunk is way more interesting than working on, say, database maintenance for a box factory, but if your health and sanity are at stake then I have to wonder why many of the devs stay at these crunch fests.

Crunch is black and white, there are companies that manage to make games without having to crunch let alone crunch for a whole year. You can't excuse it by saying people should just go get other jobs that don't have any crunch. You shouldn't have to give up the job you love because the project management and working conditions are so poor. The industry as a whole should be doing a better job of looking after their workforce instead of driving people into the ground and then replacing them with the next generation of developers straight out of university and repeating the cycle. As arquetrus points out companies are taking advantage of the passion people have for games and exploiting that.

[Wrathbone]

Crunch is not black and white either - on the one hand the company shouldn't be treating their staff like this, but on the other hand the software job market is quite healthy, and there are development jobs out there which pay well and don't demand regular crunch. I get that working on Cyberpunk is way more interesting than working on, say, database maintenance for a box factory, but if your health and sanity are at stake then I have to wonder why many of the devs stay at these crunch fests.

Crunch is black and white, there are companies that manage to make games without having to crunch let alone crunch for a whole year. You can't excuse it by saying people should just go get other jobs that don't have any crunch.

I'm not excusing it, I'm stating that developers have a choice and that by accepting crunch they're enabling their companies. If all the devs said no, fuck you, and outright refused crunch, they may all get fired and that would be horrible. But the studio would be history, and other studios would probably take note. Positive change is rarely painless.

Please, please, please don't take this to mean that I'm blaming devs for crunch. I'm not. I'm a developer (not in the gaming industry) and I know what it's like to be under pressure to meet an unrealistic deadline. I know what it's like when management ignore your time estimates and try to throw more work in at the last minute. I also know that if I and other developers at our company didn't stand up for ourselves and refuse to regularly work outside normal contracted hours, the company would 100% take advantage of that and crunch would creep in. Why wouldn't they?

It's not black and white. Large companies will always exploit staff as much as the staff allow, which is not right but is the reality of our society. Better working conditions start from the bottom up. As much as I want to play Cyberpunk, I'd have full respect for the devs if they banded together and refused to crunch, even if that pushed the release date well into next year.

[DjchunKfunK]

You say you are not but you are pretty much blaming the developers for enabling crunch. By saying it is on them to quit or rise up and say no you are putting all the impetus on them and excusing management for poor project management and exploitation. It's an extreme example but are people working in sweatshops to blame for the conditions they work in?

You make it sound really easy for a developer to just up and quit and go work somewhere else be these things are rarely if ever that easy. Quitting also doesn't solve the fact that there are people coming out of university every year desperate to work on games and willing to put up with these conditions for a chance. It is on the management to make conditions better and yes developers can push for that as well but as long as people just put the onus on them to do all the work things are not going to improve.

[Hatredsheart]

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/cd-proje ... -consoles/

[Wrathbone]

You say you are not but you are pretty much blaming the developers for enabling crunch. By saying it is on them to quit or rise up and say no you are putting all the impetus on them and excusing management for poor project management and exploitation. It's an extreme example but are people working in sweatshops to blame for the conditions they work in?

You make it sound really easy for a developer to just up and quit and go work somewhere else be these things are rarely if ever that easy. Quitting also doesn't solve the fact that there are people coming out of university every year desperate to work on games and willing to put up with these conditions for a chance. It is on the management to make conditions better and yes developers can push for that as well but as long as people just put the onus on them to do all the work things are not going to improve.

Let's agree to disagree. Developers are not to blame for crunch, but the responsibility to demand change ultimately lies with them. The exploiters have no interest in ending their exploitation.

[DjchunKfunK]

Mate you can't say let's agree to disagree and then throw out another point.

[Wrathbone]

Just summarising my thoughts on the matter.